I have a 69 Corvette and want to put bigger wheels and tires on it. I am looking at putting 17x8 wheelson the front and the rear with 245/45-17 tires in the front and 255/45-17 tires outback. The car has the factory suspension, brakes and trailing arms.My questions are: Will this wheel and tire combination fit the car without any modifications to the trailing arms or suspension? If it does what is the recommended backspacing? If it does not what modifications will need to be done?

Thank you for your time to answer my questions.

 

[sm=welcomesign.gif]to the Corvette forum.

There's probably someone here that can answer your question but will need a little more info like backspacing or offset &wheel width. The tire sizes should be no problem.

I'm running 255/60-15 on 8.5" wheels with about -0.5" offset. Had to trim a little bit of fiberglass behind the front end of the rocker panel. Have about 3/8" clearance to the parking brake cable tab on the trailing arm.

 

Well, 8" is standard wheel width, so the wheels will be fine with 4" backspacing. Standard tires are 225mm cross section ("fatness"), so you are adding 20-30mm (just under an inch and just over an inch) to each. On 8" rims with 4" backspacing, you will need half of that difference on each side of the tire for clearance, but 1" further out than the "bulge" on the standard 15" rims.

If you have more than a half inch to play with, you'll be fine. Remember that the suspension movement, you'll need that clearance well above where you are looking when it is sitting still. If you don't have the clearance up into the wheel well, you might want to drop the fatness down a bit.

bill.